Yum! Research Proposals!
I’ve wrapped up all writing responsibilities, save final papers, for the semester. And I’ve completed all but one stats test. This means I have nothing to do prior to the semester ending, EXCEPT write two research proposals. That’s a lot to do, but I’ve gotten a good start this weekend, spending a fair chunk of Saturday looking thru abstracts and finding relevant articles. I’m now working on outlines and reading articles. Hopefully I will have a more detailed outline completed by next weekend.
So, what am I working on?
1. Changing Uses and Gratifications of Television Viewing Before and After a Move to an Assisted Living Facility.
Uses and Gratifications (U&G) is a broad field in Communications these days. Sure, we can find out how much television people watch, how much time they spend reading newspapers, how much time they spend online – but isn’t the important question, and the one whose answer allows for more prediction, WHY people use media? Wouldn’t we expect that a person who watches TV to stay informed about current events to be different from a person who watches TV because he needs something to fill up his otherwise unstructured day?
The problem with a lot of the research in this field, both on the general population and on older people, is that the data is cross-sectional (in other words, the information is gathered once for a variety of ages or situations, and then analyzed). Because this data still offers hypotheses about certain contextual variables (mobility, social interaction, et cetera) affecting media use, I plan to use longitudinal data (two measures, at least) of older people before and after they move into a retirement home or assisted living facility. By measuring the contextual variables as well, we should get a better sense of what changes when a person makes that move and how those changes might impact their viewing. Believe it or not, no one has done a study like this before. CRAZY!
2. Image Theory and Decision Regret.
Image Theory is a model for decision making that says we make decisions by taking into account what matters to us, rather than the rational decision makers that economic decision making models posit. Those with strong Value Images are more likely to make good decisions. But what about the reverse? If a person has a weak Value Image (is not able to clearly state his values), will he be more likely to regret the decisions that he makes?
Regret is an area of decision making that is, in my opinion, largely understudied. While there are many areas of study explaining how we make ourselves happy with our decisions, very few studies have been done to predict when we will NOT feel happy with a decision. And while there are measured areas that seem to correlate with increased regret (including depression), no one has combined Image Theory and regret into one study.
Anyway, so that’s what I’m working on! So far, so good, though I’ve never written a research proposal before, so I’m trying to read as many literature reviews as I can to make sure that my formating is correct. It might also be time to break out the old APA manual for a quick refresher. Hopefully, the end of the semester won’t come too fast!
Related posts (automatically generated):